Playground makeover delights Burham school

A playground makeover welcomed children returning from half term holidays at Burham CofE Primary School this week.

A dozen staff from the local electricity company, UK Power Networks, equipped with materials from their contractor, Modus Utilities, spent Friday transforming a bushy area of the school grounds into an exciting new play area.

Complete with a large new sandpit, wooden wigwam and mud kitchen, the area will make a popular addition to the school grounds. There are still some finishing touches to make to the garden so it will open to the year one pupils in September.

Once the scrub was cleared and ground levelled, the electricity workers moved in half a tonne of stone chippings, one-and-a-half tonnes of play sand and railway sleepers to create the new play zone in Bell Lane.

Steve Carlow, major connections manager at UK Power Networks, led the challenge after his wife Charlotte, a teacher, asked her husband for help to improve the play area for the children.

Steve said: “She was amazed by how much we managed to get done in the time. We hope the kids will love using the new play area and apart from being a good team building session, working outside, it was great to give something back to our local community and see something tangible that we have constructed at the end of the day. The team loved doing it.

“Before we set to work it was a bushed area, which we cleared and levelled, before installing a large sandpit and a wooden wigwam, which we built. We like to stretch ourselves. We enjoyed the day and managed to get everything done, so we also built a flat-pack mud kitchen.”

Headteacher, Michelle Grima, said: “We are overwhelmed by their generosity. They did a lot of work on the day and it looks amazing. We are a small school so a project like this means a lot to us. We had set money aside for this project, but they didn’t spend it, so now we can put the funds towards something else and it has prompted us to look at another project.”

The new play area will be completed with a planter and some sensory surfaces, which Steve is returning to the school to complete in his spare time.

Steve thanked Modus Utilities and said the team could not have completed the challenge without their help in providing all the materials for the challenge.